I cannot speak for everyone, but for me there are 3 reasons:
It's the fourth non-Malfurion druid hero, and as much as I welcome a tauren hero, it was never going to be as interesting as a second non-Valeera rogue hero.
Iksar had made it clear we were getting a tauren soon, so there wasn't much surprise excitement.
It got leaked ahead of time, so a lot of the interest was soaked up by the article covering the leak.
Honestly, I was surprised this didn't happen half a year ago since she has always been cheesing out Libram of Hope. It was never quite as back-breaking or consistent as with Tip the Scales at the moment, but it was always a nonsense high-roll to have to face on turn 4.
Anyway, I'm glad I can finally get rid of my golden one and turn it into something I'll actually enjoy using.
Filling in for Goliath a bit since he hasn't read the War of the Ancients books, the wild gods do indeed turn up, especially in Book 3.
I liken their role to the ents in Lord of the Rings: there's a friendly one the heroes encounter early on (Treebeard / Cenarius), who ends up spending a jolly long time debating with the others, who eventually join the fray when they decide there is no other option.
The Core set won't contain anything close to "all the essential cards". There are still lots of relevant cards you want to collect from expansions, and you'll need your own copies if you want to keep using them in the Wild and Classic formats after they leave the Core set.
It'll be enough for everyone to get started, and will remain relevant as years pass and Hearthstone evolves, but it's not enough to undermine the concept of a collectible game.
I'm interested to see if they use the Core set as a way to give good support to particular archetypes for a year, knowing they can remove that support next year. They already allow the last expansion of a year to be strong because it will be in Standard for the least time, and Core cards can be around for even less time, so it would be a consistent approach.
With that in mind, maybe they really want to try to get an OTK rogue to work this year and include Evasion to help with that. It's not like the community has a grudge against the archetype at the moment. When did we last see one have any meta relevance? Miracle rogue?
So yeah, Cheat Death would be an awful idea, but Evasion can be justified and brand new secrets can easily be designed to not cause trouble.
I doubt they'll put old rogue secrets in the Core set this year, more because of specific Year of the Phoenix cards than it being a general problem.
Shadowjeweler Hanar makes Cheat Death too strong in Standard, since it means the opponent is punished for killing Hanar just as much as for leaving him alive.
Meanwhile, Cloak of Shadows alongside Evasion might give rogue a bit too much survivability. That raises a class identity issue, and allows the class to stall for 4 turns, which is asking for trouble with possible OTK decks. If the OTK part of the deck just doesn't exist, then that's a non-issue, but at that point would we even care about Evasion? It's not a secret you just casually throw into any old (secret) deck.
Sudden Betrayal would be fine, but would perhaps not add much.
That being said, the Core set does give the class just as solid a bedrock of secret support as hunter, mage and paladin going forwards, so in that sense I am completely with you.
If it actually took anywhere near 10 months I might consider taking up socialism and fighting for .png equality :P
I'd be surprised and disappointed if it didn't arrive during the first expansion of the year, and astonished if it still wasn't out by the end of the second. It's already nearly a year since they teased it would be "legendary".
Now for something more subtle and only noticable by yourself... What about playing a topdecked card (which flips the board state in your favor) instead of playing the exact same copy of that topdecked card which you already had several turns earlier in your hand. Would this also be considered as BM or does it just proof that you are being an ass**le? 😅
There is actually a good reason to do that: it makes your opponent more likely to think you didn't already have the card in your hand, and are therefore unlikely to play around the second copy in the following turn(s). However, if you play the version that's been sat in your hand for a while, the opponent knows you were holding onto it, so the second copy could easily be one of the other cards you've been holding onto. I'm sure game theory could weigh in here, but it's an area of maths that I never studied formally so I'll leave it to someone else to say exactly how (if at all).
That doesn't stop it being BM if the decision to play the top-decked card was based (partly) on annoying the opponent. The key part here is the intent, rather than the action itself. In other words I consider any action intended to tilt, anger, or otherwise annoy the opponent to be BM, but the same action made without any such intent is fine. Naturally it can be pretty difficult to tell them apart, but at least BM-ers are often kind enough to keep BM-ing to help make it obvious.
Let me just say that I hate, hate, hate the Not So Lonely achievement (end your turn with a Redeemed Pariah with 10 attack or higher in play). 8/10 on that one and it's brutally stupid. They don't last until the next turn so you literally have to play the pariah plus 8 outcast cards on the same turn. Not well designed, especially since you must run all the small cost outcast cards and then proceed to sit on them turn after turn to build your hand big enough.
If you have Arch-Thief Rafaam, you can just cast the +10/+10 treasure on the Pariah. All you need is a mana discount somewhere and you're good to go. It's against the spirit of the achievement but it's better than getting too frustrated over it.
My understanding is that you will have non-golden versions of all Core set cards as long as all your classes are level 10 or higher. The neutrals only need a combined level of 60, which only needs 6 classes at 10.
As for golden versions, I think they said they'll be given out through achievements (probably something simple like playing/winning X games with class Y, but they may be card specific).
Do we know if the lvl 50 free hero portraits will be the same for the next pass or are these a one time thing?
We haven't been told anything about this, but the expectation is that the lvl 50 portraits will stick around for a while, with the most logical guess being for 10 expansions so that a single player could obtain all of them if they were around the whole time. It's all speculation though.
Thanks :) The revelation that the main colours of shuckle and Valeera are essentially the same inspired me to give myself a little upgrade. The choice to turn my initial drawing into a bit of pixel art certainly paid off.
Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.
In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 6 card packs and 500 gold.
Wow that does sound pretty rewarding.
Are achievements necessary for the grind or are they just a nice thing to do along the way?
The XP-giving achievements are a nice bonus, but not necessary. Most of them are worth 200XP, which equates to about 30 minutes of normal gameplay in ranked. If you get the cards related to them then you might as well do them, and you'll find guides for most of the achievements in OoC threads, but there's no need to worry much about them.
I should also correct my previous post: one of those card packs was a card back... It's an easy mistake to make!
Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.
In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 5 card packs, 1 card back and 500 gold.
Neat! As I said, he's really only impressive in 2 decks, so do take that into consideration when deciding whether to craft him or not.
Tak + Prep + Academic Espionage is a third approach, but lacks the finality Ra or a horde of mechanical rabbits has. It also wasn't helped by the nerf to Prep meaning you can only play 1 of those cards on the same turn.
I've tried to make him work in so many more decks, but sadly his utility is limited by 'casts when drawn' cards not actually drawing a card when played from hand.
Aww, poor Tak Nozwhisker. Left out of one of the two decks* he's actually good in. The world has been so cruel to the old kobold, you can't possibly be so heartless as to take that away from him :(
That's a good summary of something I planned to look into myself over the weekend. I guess I'll chip in a few of my immediate thoughts while I'm here.
Neutral Basic
The murlocs look unimpressive, but aside from Murloc Raider these little guys are always an important backbone to murloc decks.
I'd actually be more surprised to see Stonetusk Boar stick around than any others here, since that card has long been cited as a major limit on design space, even though it looks innocuous.
Maybe they'll take the opportunity to remove charge completely? (Except for Kayn Sunfury.)
The fact they got 13 cards from here indicates they either want to retain some of the old favourites in order to keep a clear idea of what the vanilla stat-line is (e.g. Yeti, Sen'jin), or they will hand out quite a few buffs to those that are quite interesting but way too weak to see play anymore.
Priest
I guess priest had it easy since they were prepared for this last year.
My guess is Shadowform is being reworked a bit, hence why it is allowed back from the HoF. Then they'll print some cards that behave differently based on whether you're in shadowform or not.
Mage
Whatever happens, I just hope Sorcerer's Apprentice finally leaves Standard. That card has dodged do many bullets over the years it's not even funny.
OG Warlock demons
Honestly, I miss how demons were designed at the start. I appreciate it didn't work out very often, but it made them so much more interesting and flavourful than the demons we've got since. They had a tribal identity of being strong at a cost (basically converting some of the mana cost into something else, e.g. a discard), but nowadays demons are just another tribe with nothing really setting them apart.
I haven't got much to say regarding what I expect to see in the Core set here. Just airing a pet peeve.
Secrets
The number of secrets needed is something we've been able to test in rogue, and it looks like you can indeed get away with just 3 total, so long as they are all relevant. Note they can include Year of the Phoenix secrets in the count too, and they don't actually need enough within the Core set itself.
It is possible they will drop paladin secrets next year. They are certainly able to now they have the Core set mechanism.
I wondered whether they'll bring back any of the K&C secrets for rogue. Probably not since Cheat Death is stupid OP alongside Shadowjeweler Hanar, and Evasion is a bit too similar to Cloak of Shadows unless they really want an OTK rogue to exist this year. Sudden Betrayal would be fine, but I'm not sure how much it would add.
General comment
I guess they haven't said all the original 9 classes will get the same number from each of Basic, Classic and Wild. Granted the 54 from Classic and 36 from Wild are both divisible by 9 - so they probably will - but we can at least entertain the possibility that they won't. It could certainly help with some of the classes whose Basic/Classic sets haven't held up so well.
I guess I'll try out some of the classics since I've only joined some time around Blackrock Mountain. As a Hunter main that certainly means Undertaker Hunter, but I'm also curious about Patron Warrior and Miracle or Oil Rogue.
* That's a complete lie that it is sad you won't be able to play Undertaker Hunter. We all agreed never to go there again... until they printed Tunnel Trogg of course, and caused more or less the exact same problem. But since then, never again. For realsies this time.
I cannot speak for everyone, but for me there are 3 reasons:
Honestly, I was surprised this didn't happen half a year ago since she has always been cheesing out Libram of Hope. It was never quite as back-breaking or consistent as with Tip the Scales at the moment, but it was always a nonsense high-roll to have to face on turn 4.
Anyway, I'm glad I can finally get rid of my golden one and turn it into something I'll actually enjoy using.
Filling in for Goliath a bit since he hasn't read the War of the Ancients books, the wild gods do indeed turn up, especially in Book 3.
I liken their role to the ents in Lord of the Rings: there's a friendly one the heroes encounter early on (Treebeard / Cenarius), who ends up spending a jolly long time debating with the others, who eventually join the fray when they decide there is no other option.
The Core set won't contain anything close to "all the essential cards". There are still lots of relevant cards you want to collect from expansions, and you'll need your own copies if you want to keep using them in the Wild and Classic formats after they leave the Core set.
It'll be enough for everyone to get started, and will remain relevant as years pass and Hearthstone evolves, but it's not enough to undermine the concept of a collectible game.
I'm interested to see if they use the Core set as a way to give good support to particular archetypes for a year, knowing they can remove that support next year. They already allow the last expansion of a year to be strong because it will be in Standard for the least time, and Core cards can be around for even less time, so it would be a consistent approach.
With that in mind, maybe they really want to try to get an OTK rogue to work this year and include Evasion to help with that. It's not like the community has a grudge against the archetype at the moment. When did we last see one have any meta relevance? Miracle rogue?
So yeah, Cheat Death would be an awful idea, but Evasion can be justified and brand new secrets can easily be designed to not cause trouble.
I doubt they'll put old rogue secrets in the Core set this year, more because of specific Year of the Phoenix cards than it being a general problem.
Shadowjeweler Hanar makes Cheat Death too strong in Standard, since it means the opponent is punished for killing Hanar just as much as for leaving him alive.
Meanwhile, Cloak of Shadows alongside Evasion might give rogue a bit too much survivability. That raises a class identity issue, and allows the class to stall for 4 turns, which is asking for trouble with possible OTK decks. If the OTK part of the deck just doesn't exist, then that's a non-issue, but at that point would we even care about Evasion? It's not a secret you just casually throw into any old (secret) deck.
Sudden Betrayal would be fine, but would perhaps not add much.
That being said, the Core set does give the class just as solid a bedrock of secret support as hunter, mage and paladin going forwards, so in that sense I am completely with you.
If it actually took anywhere near 10 months I might consider taking up socialism and fighting for .png equality :P
I'd be surprised and disappointed if it didn't arrive during the first expansion of the year, and astonished if it still wasn't out by the end of the second. It's already nearly a year since they teased it would be "legendary".
There is actually a good reason to do that: it makes your opponent more likely to think you didn't already have the card in your hand, and are therefore unlikely to play around the second copy in the following turn(s). However, if you play the version that's been sat in your hand for a while, the opponent knows you were holding onto it, so the second copy could easily be one of the other cards you've been holding onto. I'm sure game theory could weigh in here, but it's an area of maths that I never studied formally so I'll leave it to someone else to say exactly how (if at all).
That doesn't stop it being BM if the decision to play the top-decked card was based (partly) on annoying the opponent. The key part here is the intent, rather than the action itself. In other words I consider any action intended to tilt, anger, or otherwise annoy the opponent to be BM, but the same action made without any such intent is fine. Naturally it can be pretty difficult to tell them apart, but at least BM-ers are often kind enough to keep BM-ing to help make it obvious.
If you have Arch-Thief Rafaam, you can just cast the +10/+10 treasure on the Pariah. All you need is a mana discount somewhere and you're good to go. It's against the spirit of the achievement but it's better than getting too frustrated over it.
My understanding is that you will have non-golden versions of all Core set cards as long as all your classes are level 10 or higher. The neutrals only need a combined level of 60, which only needs 6 classes at 10.
As for golden versions, I think they said they'll be given out through achievements (probably something simple like playing/winning X games with class Y, but they may be card specific).
We haven't been told anything about this, but the expectation is that the lvl 50 portraits will stick around for a while, with the most logical guess being for 10 expansions so that a single player could obtain all of them if they were around the whole time. It's all speculation though.
Thanks :) The revelation that the main colours of shuckle and Valeera are essentially the same inspired me to give myself a little upgrade. The choice to turn my initial drawing into a bit of pixel art certainly paid off.
The XP-giving achievements are a nice bonus, but not necessary. Most of them are worth 200XP, which equates to about 30 minutes of normal gameplay in ranked. If you get the cards related to them then you might as well do them, and you'll find guides for most of the achievements in OoC threads, but there's no need to worry much about them.
I should also correct my previous post: one of those card packs was a card back... It's an easy mistake to make!
Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.
In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 5 card packs, 1 card back and 500 gold.
Since they're in the Hall of Fame, and we know only Shadowform is returning from there, we can safely say they will not be in the Core set this year.
Neat! As I said, he's really only impressive in 2 decks, so do take that into consideration when deciding whether to craft him or not.
Tak + Prep + Academic Espionage is a third approach, but lacks the finality Ra or a horde of mechanical rabbits has. It also wasn't helped by the nerf to Prep meaning you can only play 1 of those cards on the same turn.
I've tried to make him work in so many more decks, but sadly his utility is limited by 'casts when drawn' cards not actually drawing a card when played from hand.
Aww, poor Tak Nozwhisker. Left out of one of the two decks* he's actually good in. The world has been so cruel to the old kobold, you can't possibly be so heartless as to take that away from him :(
* Pogo- and Ra-rogue.
The DH Initiate set rotates too, except for whichever 4 cards are being put in the Core set.
That's a good summary of something I planned to look into myself over the weekend. I guess I'll chip in a few of my immediate thoughts while I'm here.
Neutral Basic
Priest
Mage
Whatever happens, I just hope Sorcerer's Apprentice finally leaves Standard. That card has dodged do many bullets over the years it's not even funny.
OG Warlock demons
Honestly, I miss how demons were designed at the start. I appreciate it didn't work out very often, but it made them so much more interesting and flavourful than the demons we've got since. They had a tribal identity of being strong at a cost (basically converting some of the mana cost into something else, e.g. a discard), but nowadays demons are just another tribe with nothing really setting them apart.
I haven't got much to say regarding what I expect to see in the Core set here. Just airing a pet peeve.
Secrets
General comment
I guess they haven't said all the original 9 classes will get the same number from each of Basic, Classic and Wild. Granted the 54 from Classic and 36 from Wild are both divisible by 9 - so they probably will - but we can at least entertain the possibility that they won't. It could certainly help with some of the classes whose Basic/Classic sets haven't held up so well.
Sadly* it's a flat no on all of those except Miracle Rogue. Undertaker, Tinker's Sharpsword Oil and Grim Patron were from Naxx, GvG and Blackrock respectively.
* That's a complete lie that it is sad you won't be able to play Undertaker Hunter. We all agreed never to go there again... until they printed Tunnel Trogg of course, and caused more or less the exact same problem. But since then, never again. For realsies this time.